Raising her voice in war’s aftermath

A Woman in Berlin

Eight Weeks in the Conquered City

Anonymous

Metropolitan Books: 262 pp., $23

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WHEN “A Woman in Berlin” was first published in Germany in 1959, the gripping, intimate account of the Russian takeover of the city in spring 1945 sparked controversy. (The diary was first published in the United States in English in 1954; it is being reissued this month in a new translation by Philip Boehm.) Some German commentators accused its anonymous author of “besmirching the honor of German women,” a charge that she, with her characteristic wry viewpoint, might have parried by pointing out that the fate of defeated Berlin’s 2 million civilians -- freezing, starvation and the mass rape of more than 100,000 women and girls -- besmirched the honor of German men.

In the traumatized Germany of 1959, frustration and repressed shame fueled the vicious name-calling that greeted the diary and its author. (There were immediate attempts to identify her, using the few clues she provided -- a thirtyish journalist who describes herself as “a pale-faced blonde always dressed in the same winter coat.”) Anonymous doesn’t blame her countrymen for failing to hold the line -- war is war, after all. But one evening, while straining pumped water to remove wood splinters, she reflects on the mind-set of leaders who “went to such efforts to build barricades ... but didn’t give the slightest thought to ... water stations for the siege.”

Likewise, abandoned police barracks were found stuffed with goodies but no provision had been made to provide cows’ milk for infants whose starving mothers couldn’t nurse. Finally, she questions the wisdom of a Nazi order to leave all liquor for the advancing Russian troops, on the theory that drunken soldiers don’t fight as well as sober ones. “Now that’s something only men could cook up for other men.... I’m convinced that [without alcohol] half as many rapes would have taken place. These men aren’t natural Casanovas. They had to goad themselves ... had to drown their inhibitions.”

The remark typifies her clarity, even when she was numbed by fear, hunger, pain or despair. She writes of the victims of the bombing and occupation reverting to looting and stealing, indifferent to the suffering of others.

They had, she writes, brought on their own unprecedented defeat: “Our German calamity has a bitter taste -- of repulsion, sickness, insanity, unlike anything in history. The radio just broadcast another concentration camp report. The most horrific thing is the order and the thrift: millions of human beings as fertilizer, mattress stuffing, soft soap, felt mats -- Aeschylus never saw anything like that.”

Nor are the Russian pillagers all monsters: They melt at the sight of small children; some give food to their “prey.” One talks politics, another plays “Il Trovatore” beautifully on a harmonica. A third, mid-rape, speaks tearfully of his “love.”

Anonymous had traveled in the Soviet Union before the war, picking up enough Russian to communicate with the victors entering Berlin. The first “enemy” to breach her building’s basement bomb shelter, filled with quaking women and hidden girls, is momentarily disarmed when she speaks to him in Russian. “Evidently, he’s never heard one of us ‘mutes’ address him in his own language.”

She doesn’t linger on the brutal assaults that lead her to seek a protector, a lifeline -- an officer-rapist who not only defends her against the others but also offers protection, even spoils, to her building mates. A new term soon enters the city’s vocabulary: to “sleep up” some food.

Anonymous adopts as a mantra the saying, “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” She derives strength and sanity from her writing, and these diary entries contain a certain sense of irony. In darker moments she thinks that there can be no improving the world, that “the sum total of tears always stays the same.” But there is no hint of self-pity in her journal, nor any attempt at self-exoneration.

Given the frankness of her account, and its nasty first reception, it isn’t surprising that Anonymous wished to remain so, refusing to authorize republication of “A Woman” until after her death, which came in 2001. But when a new German edition of the diary, which had become something of a feminist classic, came out in 2003, the hue and cry over her identity began again.

Let Anonymous stand witness as she wished to: as an undistorted voice for all women in war and its aftermath, whatever their names or nation or ethnicity. Anywhere.

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Kai Maristed is the author of the novels “Broken Ground,” “Out After Dark” and “Fall.”